Tuesday, 28 July 2015

Is it me, or has the content on social media channels lost its freshness and edge?

As an early adopter I remember the days when we shared punchy, out-of-the-box content. I remember the days when we had full-fledged conversations on social media. I remember the days when we cherished the affordances of the various channels and used them for different purposes. I remember the days that we shared more from our heart than our head. I remember the days when social media channels were more SOCIAL than media.

In reading Twitter's blogpost "Introducing event targeting", I could not but smile at the statement "if it’s happening in the world, it’s happening on Twitter”. It is now conventional wisdom that Twitter’s strength is “providing as-it-happens coverage and commentary on live events”.

To prove this point, I checked the live Twitter feed from an event which was taking place at that moment. I was stunned by how we may have ran out of creativity and as a result the messages and content seem to have lost their punchiness and sound and look all the same. Scanning the feed made me realize that we may be living under the false impression that we've outsmarted Twitter's technological affordance.

We seem to have forgotten that Twitter was born to convey messages in 140 characters or less. We've forgotten the mantra "If you can't explain it in 140 characters, your idea is too complicated!" We seem to have forgotten why Twitter is at its best during live events. We seem to have forgotten that while maintaining a professional tone, what travels well is a message from the heart.

No doubt that a picture is worth more than 1000 words and we all agree that it is great to add a photo in your tweet highlighting what is happening in that very moment. This said, I am not sure, whether it is cool to add photos jam packed with text to outsmart the 140 character limit.

In the good old days we conveyed a message with 140 characters or less. This meant we spent more time to craft a punchy, meaningful, relevant and engaging content which had the potential of going viral.

We seem to have forgotten the wonderful and unique affordances of the various social media channels. We seem to have forgotten that social media networks are supposed to connect PEOPLE and as such, in sharing content, we need to talk WITH people, and not AT them. We seem to have forgotten that the key to success on social media is engagement.

This brings me to content curation – which I believe to be an art and something that we should do more of. The key to success is walking a fine line between delivering relevant and timely social engaging content without this being “contaminated” with our own bias and/or interest, without it being a megaphone or in the worst case scenario end up being propaganda.

In scanning the various social media channels, I longed for the conversational tone, I looked high and low to find a piece content that I could engage with, a soundbite from the heart. What I found was more of the same. I wonder if the lack of punchy and engaging content is to avoid getting into trouble? And if so, this is probably one of the reasons we are seeing less and less viral content.

How can we go back to create conversational and real content, content that touches both hearts and minds and goes viral.

Think about it, when was the last time you shared a piece of content? Why did you do it? Probably because it was something that touched your heart, meant something to you and your community. It may have been counterintuitive and controversial, it may have been simply fun and something out of the ordinary.

As an avid follower of Simon Sinek, recently I've been pondering whether we've lost sight of the WHY of social media and are exclusively focusing on the WHAT and HOW.

So, is all lost…. or have we reached a point where we need to think of what's the next big thing for social media? Maybe it is time to find our way back to the beginnings of social media – to the WHY.

Maybe we need to come to terms with the fact that the next big thing is social media is to go back to the original affordances and uniqueness of the various technologies.

Maybe we need to go back to basics. Let's be less of an emulator and more of an innovator. Join the conversation.... @rsamii